Biography
Novelist Helen Falconer was born and brought up in London. She was educated at Camden School for Girls, Dartington School, Devon, and St. Anne's College, Oxford. She works as a book reviewer for the Guardian newspaper. Her first novel, Primrose Hill, the story of a group of North London teenagers, was published in 1999. Her second, Sky High: A Novel (2003), depicts love, sex and violence in a forbidden relationship set against an urban landscape. Her third novel, The Changeling, was published in 2015 and features Aoife, a girl living between the human and the fairy world. She takes up the story of Aoife again in Dark Beloved (2016).
Helen Falconer lived in London while she wrote her first two novels, but now lives in County Mayo in Ireland, which serves as inspiration for her two most recent novels.
Critical perspective
Helen Falconer has published two novels set in the decaying urban wastelands of North London.
Demonstrating a natural feel for demotic language, Falconer’s work is notable for its sense of place, its beautifully drawn characters, its assured structure and pacing, and its authenticity.
Primrose Hill (1999) takes the eponymous, above-the-city perch as its spiritual centre, and, from its opening, prizes the characters loose from their happy moorings there before setting them on a frightening journey into the troubled heart of moral dilemma. Danny is determined to kill his mother’s boyfriend, a heroin dealer and addict who has beaten up his junky mother again. Danny is full of take-a-stand-against-any-odds bravery and is at pains to convince Si of just how serious he is. Si, the narrator, wants nothing more than to stay on Primrose Hill, the 'high island above the warm polluted city sea', whiling away his very own summer of love with plenty of joints and The Small Faces on repeat. Into this twosome comes rich girl Eleanor, a 'seriously mad' femme fatale with a penchant for fickleness we later find has roots in a horrible family secret. She quickly understands Danny’s need to apply his fatal justice, and enthusiastically signs up to the project whilst slashing her arms and offering herself to Si. It is global-warming hot in London and Si finds himself trapped on all sides. What should he do? His commitment to his friendship with Danny is something he finds impossible to get past.
'[Danny] didn’t hang out with those arseholes in Ralph Lauren shirts and YSL jeans and too-short hair in all-white groups on the corners of buildings, comparing designer labels and waiting for someone to mug.'
It is precisely because Danny means so much to Si, that Si decides he has to help him. Of course we know everything is going to go wrong from the moment the murder plot is hatched, but we don’t know how or what Si will have to do with it. Si is a fine creation, his tragi-comic narration lifting the gloom at moments when it threatens to become unrelenting. His failure to take a firm hold on events, and his inability to truly perceive what is happening, makes him an endearing and compelling fictional companion.
The most impressive aspect of Falconer’s debut is its teenage idiom. There are no moments which have you thinking this is not something a 16-year-old would say. Falconer grew up in the Primrose Hill area and this is a novel written by someone who knows the setting intimately. She brings it entirely alive, making it as much a character as Si or Danny or Eleanor. Primrose Hill becomes where we would all like to be, out of harm’s way, with friends, getting merry and enjoying the view. Primrose Hill reminds us of the world behind chattering-class London. Yet despite revealing an abusive and violent society where the most gruesome things happen for the most inane of reasons, Falconer’s debut is in no way didactic. There is no overt moralising. A curtain is pulled back and a picture is seen. Falconer’s first novel is a funny, and at times disturbing, rites of passage tale about the retreat of idealism, and the slow dawning of realisation that, sooner or later, we all must come down from on high.
Falconer’s second novel is set in the same landscape as Primrose Hill and is once more narrated by a teenage boy with impressively long eyelashes. The characters in Sky High (2003) are either 'ground-dwellers', those who live in rich Victorian terraced houses, or 'sky-high' people, those who occupy the tower block estates. Of course, the incredible thing about London is that these different types of people live next to each other, throwing up the strangest of juxtapositions. Sixteen-year-old Ferdia is geographically a ground-dweller but, according to his best friend Matt, spiritually up in the air. Matt lives at the very top of a tower block with his permanently comatose mother and five-year-old sister. He writes rage against the machine post-punk songs about alienation and frustrated expression, and wants pretty boy Ferdia to learn the bass, join the band and help him produce what he calls 'tower-block rock'. Ferdia lives with his mother, who is only just beginning to pick herself up after Ferdia’s father ran off to live with a young pop star in her expensive St John’s Wood flat a year ago. A 22-year-old tower-block estate headcase called Jason is, much to Ferdia’s disgust, his mother’s new boyfriend. Ferdia, tired of twisting in the wind between his two homes, finds distraction in Matt’s band. That is, until he meets Cassandra, his new English teacher. Unlike Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, another recent novel dealing with a similar theme, the subsequent affair between 33-year-old Cassandra and Ferdia is seen through the eyes of the pupil. Falconer captures his enchantment and growing obsession with Cassandra quite superbly. Less convincing is the domineering Cassandra; Falconer’s portrayal of her occasionally tips over into the oversexed man-eating caricature, although it could be argued that, as we only see Cassandra through Ferdia’s eyes, it is entirely appropriate for her to be drawn in this way. Ferdia becomes so entrapped by the abusive Cassandra that he chooses, on her demand, to walk away from her friends. With their sexual life threatening to become public knowledge and with Matt slowly losing his grip on his sanity, Ferdia starts to lose control of the threads of his life. When events come to a head, they are brutal and devastating, yet ultimately redemptive.
Like Si, Ferdia is a constantly amusing narrator: 'I was at school, where everyone can hear you scream but no one bothers to intervene.' He has that combination of manic energy and existential boredom that only a teenager can carry off. And Matt is another superb creation. Falconer captures the absurd pretension of creative melancholic youth brilliantly, Matt's drivelling nonsense about the 'music gods' and his passionate refusals to pander to commercial musical concerns, make for some of the book’s most compelling moments.
With just two novels, Falconer has proved she has a fine gift for character. That Si and Ferdia are both teenage boys demonstrates that Falconer is a brave writer. Her ability to accurately capture adolescent masculine psychology is extremely impressive, as is the way she makes you feel as if you can taste the grime of London on your tongue, and feel its scattered crisp packets underfoot. Zadie Smith may have been consecrated as the modern bard of urban multicultural London, but Falconer’s grittier, more down-to-earth treatment of modern inner-city life, should not be overlooked.
Garan Holcombe, 2005
